OK GO Partners With The Playful Learning Lab To Bring OK Go Sandbox To Classrooms Around The World

OK Go has partnered with The Playful Learning Lab to launch OK Go Sandbox, an initiative to provide classrooms around the world with amazing content to use alongside the band's music videos. Created with support from Google and Morton Salt, OK Go Sandbox was formally announced this morning at the National Science Teachers Association Conference in Atlanta, GA.

OK Go Sandbox is an an online portal providing educators and students a way to engage with concepts in playful and unexpected ways. From design challenges created around science and art to informational videos about the band's creative process, the site is full of content created specifically for classroom audiences. Using OK Go's creative and widely viewed music videos as a starting point, OK Go Sandbox will be a place where learners are encouraged to try new things and to follow their own curiosity.

"We want to give teachers whatever tools they need to connect the joy, wonder, and fun in our videos to the underlying concepts that their students are learning," shared OK Go singer and video director, Damian Kulash.

Led by Kulash and The University of St. Thomas's The Playful Learning Lab director, Dr. AnnMarie Thomas, OK Go Sandbox is the direct result of feedback from hundreds of educators. After hearing from teachers who use their videos to inspire students and explain concepts in their science, math, art, and music classes, the band and Thomas set out to create additional educational resources.

"OK Go's music videos provide such a rich jumping off point for a variety of projects and discussions," added Thomas. "It's exciting to work with educators to bring the magic and joy of these videos into their own classrooms, in a way that also lets them address concepts that they are trying to teach their students."

About OK Go

Singer and video director Damian Kulash, Jr. and bassist Tim Nordwind met at summer camp in 1987, and a decade later they formed OK Go. With Dan Konopka as drummer and Andy Ross as guitarist and resident computer programmer, they've built a unique career at the intersection of music, visual art, technology, and science, emerging at the forefront of a class of artists whose 21st-century brand of experimental creativity dissolves the traditional boundaries between disciplines. OK Go have collaborated with dance companies and tech giants, cosmonauts and Muppets, scientists and entrepreneurs. Their videos have been encoded on strands of actual DNA. They've penned New York Times op-eds and testified before the US Congress, and they were President Obama's selection to perform at his 50th birthday party.

OK Go received the 2016 Smithsonian American Ingenuity Award for Visual Art, and they've been honored with a Grammy, three MTV Video Music Awards, eighteen Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity awards, six CLIO awards, three UK Music Video Awards, two Webby Awards, and have had their work presented at The Guggenheim, MoCA, LACMA, The Hirschhorn, The Hammer Museum, and Seattle's Museum of Pop Culture.

About The Playful Learning Lab

The Playful Learning Lab is a research group which develops, implements, and assesses ways of bringing joy, whimsy and play into learning environments. The Playful Learning Lab is part of the University of St. Thomas, in Minnesota. The lab director, Dr. AnnMarie Thomas, is the inventor of Squishy Circuits, founding executive director of the Maker Education Initiative, and author of "Making Makers: Kids, Tools, and the Future of Innovation."

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